Eclipse over Nameless Shore
by Bottled Fame
Summary: Decades after Voldemort's defeat, a young Charms Teacher meets an old man. His name is Severus Snape. Meanwhile AU.


**Eclipse over Nameless Shore**

Hogwarts stands tall and serenely. In an eternal pulse, corridors channel a flood of students and go silent between tides.

Friendships developed in it and were broken again, arguments erupted and ceased, Heads of Houses and School were assigned, retired, or also – occasionally - buried. People became ghosts and stayed to dwell in its rooms; creatures awoke and crept along inside its walls, then became extinct.

Wars licked on its stone.

Around it the years built up to a surging sea, her waves sempiternally being reflected on the window panes, changing nothing but the arrangement of portraits inside.

If you chose one of the February days in hard frost, and glimpsed through the lit staffroom window, you would see the teachers inside, gathered for tea and biscuits.

Bits of school talk and laughter would trickle through the panes. Witches and wizards, taking sips from cups, would remark friendly phrases, particularly to a younger woman. She would turn to the window and let the owl in, then open the delivered parchment:

_Happy Birthday, Love! Hope you are doing fine today. Nothing special over here. We are desperately waiting for spring, since Dad's cough still won't improve. Greetings to the Headmistress if you meet her these days! Mom_

The message's recepient smiled and folded the parchment. "So, will you attend that Seminar for Botany cracks, Ted?"

"By all means, yes!" Ted Baywood spread his long arms, giving her the image of an odd mixture between stork and ostrich. "Ah, Bombay! It will be great – shall I get you something from there? I know you have something in mind, the way you smirk! Oh…" He stared, collapsed his scrawny wings, and went to the door.

There, half in the shadow of the crack, stood a man. Next to him, already inside, was McGonagall. Then the sight became occluded by James "Stirrer" Weasley's lion's mane. The conversation in the room suffered a sudden, sharp break, then moved on again, less loud now and apparently proceeding only out of diplomatic politeness, as the unknown figure was drawn in by the Headmistress and followed her, clearly reluctant, on a cane's aide.

"...awfully sorry, but I think it's a good opportunity to show you a face you don't know yet."

"Really, Minerva." A soft voice, barely hiding an annoyance that was of no avail against McGonagall's rough joviality, "I'm in a hurry, and I-"

"Here!" said McGonagall, motioning, "this is our new Charms teacher, Alrun Stockheim. Her birthday is the reason why everyone is crammed in here – Alrun, Severus Snape came around for a visit. He was the Head of Slytherin when your mother was a student."

For a man, Snape was small. Longish, grey hair with black streaks in it, pale skin on gaunt features, dark eyes surrounded by deep lines, but an alert gleam in them and a hard stare. He looked old, even next to the ancient Headmistress. Coat, cane, gloves all black and elegant. "Hello," he said. "Happy Birthday."

"Thank you, Professor. Pleased to meet you."

They exchanged short, meaningless smiles. She wondered if the introduction meant that she was going to have some school business with him. "No need to call me Professor," he said.

"Severus makes a point of being retired," said McGonagall, quickly. "Anyway, I was very pleased when I received Alrun's application, seeing that her mother was such an excellent student. You remember Hermione Granger, Severus, don't you?"

For a moment, he appeared startled. Alrun knew she should say something. "Mother went to Germany after graduation and married there. She's working with the embassy."

"Ah, yes..." Rather abruptly he averted his gaze and turned to McGonagall. "It is late, Minerva. I have to go."

"Well, Ted can see you to the gates, then."

Alrun was regarded with a final stare. "_Fräulein_ Stockheim -" A nod towards the Headmistress, and soon afterwards he knocked away into the corridor, with Ted in his wake.

"Why must he always behave like a disgruntled Raven. I'm sorry, Alrun."

"I guess he just didn't approve of being snapped several decades back without warning."

"I thought he would like being reminded of a good student, for a change." McGonagall sighed. "But then again that goes along with less pleasant memories too, I suppose."

"Does he come here often? I never saw him before."

"Oh, no - Severus only comes here for business, he is living somewhere out on the Orkneys they say, but no one knows exactly - that man is well shielded! He's in Potions supply, a lot R&D as well, apparently. He visits Hogwarts if he's in need of high-priced items, and usually we give in to one of his hard deals, lest he moves on and utters threats to poor Neville Longbottom. Neville is the best equipped herbs source. Also one of your mother's peers at Hogwarts."

The Potions teacher joined in, smirking at the closed door. "Snape, the old penny-pincher. Knows how to pull us over the barrel."

"Now, now, James!" Though McGonagall appeared pleased.

* * *

That was the time when the knocking of Snape's cane became more frequent in the castle. He began to pay visits to McGonagall for no special reason, dropping en passant inquiries about that _charming Fräulein of hers_ during conversations, after Alrun had met and accompanied him up to the office, as – in his words – the damn stairs were confusing him on purpose. Alrun didn't mind assisting; actually she quite inexplicably enjoyed the old man's appearances. 

On one of these occasions she and Snape were detoured by Sybill Trelawney. They had been alerted by her shriek, hailng from remote corridors, "PeeVeees...aN aRT...", and had located and followed her as she staggered to the staffroom. It turned out that The Stirrer was hiding in it, accompanied only by Ted.

James's hair stood stiff and stilted in all directions, a magnificent strawberry blonde halo around a face that expressed pure accusation. "Sir, this is not what I expected when you promised me a remedy for unruly hair!"

"Yes, indeed. I don't see any difference, either," replied Snape. His lips twitched only a little as he glanced at Alrun, who struggled hard to not laugh out loud, while Ted was hovering in the background, concealing his feelings behind the Quibbler, whose front page quivered as it blinked in huge, black letters, "Ban of Nude Apparition Endangers Future of Wizarding Britain!"

"He who has the Grim!" proclaimed Trelawney with her deathly shriek, "Will be the smartest wizard of his age!" Then she coughed delicately and wafted away.

Whatever was happening behind the Quibbler, its front page was definitely shaking now. James was not amused. "It's not funny!" he snapped.

"Oh, I should think that your father might appreciate that little idea of mine!" Snape pulled a small vial from his pockets. "Obviously, you didn't receive the second component…"

James grabbed the vial, huffed "Thank you, sir!" and rushed out (sideways, for otherwise the glorious coiffure would not fit through the door), at which point the other teachers' countenance dissolved into snorting laughter. Until this died down again, Snape helped himself to a cup of coffee, his amusement condensed in a raised eyebrow.

"Don't get us wrong, sir," said Ted. "We both really like our Potionmaster, but his consistent affliction about his hair…this was just too fitting!"

Snape nodded. "I just had to go back in my journals and look up an old mishap, actually."

Both looked at him, thinking the same, but not daring to ask. Instead Alrun said, "Can I have the newspaper, Ted? There's this report on a solar eclipse I want to read."

"Marvellous, a total eclipse so far in the North, isn't it? And in the polar summer, too! Here it will be only partial, though. Ah, I'd like to watch a total eclipse again - someday."

"You could go there, you know. Apparate."

"Impossible, I'm afraid. With a wife, two pre-schoolers and a baby expecting me to be dear daddy – if I went away just a minute for a lark, Gale would kill me – or, even worse, call for a divorce!"

"Consider your priorities, my friend."

"This is precisely the kind of sympathy I was calling for – well, I'm off. Good-Bye, Mister Snape. Tomorrow I'll send you some Datura." The door closed.

"You want to go?" the old man asked into the silence.

"Go where?"

"To see that arctic eclipse."

* * *

The tearing and squeezing trepidation came to an end on a narrow shore below a steep cliff. A zillion birds shrieked. Blazing air, pastel sea, rustle and crackle of shells and gravel under the breakers' frothy hem. 

And there was something else. Alrun spun around. In front of her towered a mountain of blotched, off-white fur with heavy muscles twitching underneath. Eyes as cold as black pinheads. Yellow teeth and the release of a hot, predatory, roaring exhale. She was caught in stillness, petrified, could only watch while next to her Snape aimed his wand with amazing, sparing litheness and, by erecting a flashing wall of fire, pushed the bear into a jog, away towards the other side of the bay. Pandemonium on the cliff and booming clouds of stroking wings drowned the sound of wind and waves. Alrun finally breathed.

"Yes," said Snape calmly, as though nothing minatory had happened, "the sea has the best air."

She suspected that the scene had never raised his pulse. "This was as quick as it was effective, thank you!" Then she looked at him and said "And you are without your cane!"

"I am?" Astounded, Snape stared at his hand and the empty air beneath. "Oh, yes – must have been the excited anticipation of our bold venture. Well, it won't matter. I only use it for effect."

They were early, for Snape had insisted in _capturing the scene_. So they strolled along the waterline and picked up pebbles and shells until Alrun remarked that something seemed to be different with the sand. Snape said this was due to the anisotropy in the shadows of objects and that the eclipse was about to become noticeable. He pulled out two pairs of goggles. "Use them if you want to watch the sun."

"Are they safe?"

"I should hope so. George Weasley made them – even though the Weasley lot never grow up, one may still trust their products."

The colours faded as the temperature dropped notably, causing a mysterious mist over the creamy surf of liquid lead, a swirling smoke in a fresh gust. The birdcries were dying down, all remaining sound intensified. Alrun gazed from the orange horizon up into the deep blue zenith, knowing that the grand shadow hurtled towards the shore like a dark veil. An absurd awe grasped her throat. She took on the goggles, saw the last flash of sunlight as a bright diamond on a delicate ring.

* * *

"A solar eclipse is like life itself," noted Snape before they left. "Actually, it's good if a life has an eclipse in it – it makes the rest of it brighter." He smiled. "Funny, I never thought of it that way before." 

Alrun felt a refreshing, juvenile gratefulness, not only for the sun that was shining on her face, but also for the experience and the sharing of it with a person who was spare on words. "I would not want my eclipse to last too long," she replied.

Snape pulled his wand for apparition. "That's mainly a matter of fortune, and therefore it's not upon us to decide."

* * *

_Dumbledore was ascending the stairs which always started to move just as Snape tried to follow the Headmaster into the corridors. It was like wading through deep water. He was tired, and the fighting silhouettes on the stairs distracted him. Umbridge was there, too, circling him as she jumped like a dwarfish devil and hissed, "Mudbloods, Halfbreads, Blood Traitors!" He looked down and saw that he was holding a little girl's hand. She had something to do with him and with Hermione Granger, but he could not recall what it was. Lucius and Bella were dancing near a gaping cleft where a staircase had vanished, and he told them to look where they were going, but they would not listen; instead, they whirled around and around, their feet sometimes diving into the empty air._

_Then a strange dusk crept in, and suddenly the girl was missing. He looked around and tried to call her name, but no sound emerged, and anyway he realised that he had forgotten it. He searched in his pockets, not knowing what he was looking for, pulled out vials that were labelled with incomprehensible terms. There was a vial that clearly contained dragon's blood, but he did not know what it was for. Dumbledore, very far away, motioned and disappeared in a broom closet, leaving him behind as he struggled to move._

_Suddenly Trelawney was there, stared at him with her wide eyes. She was very close as she held up a huge Chocolate-frog card with the Hanged Man on it. She laughed as though she would never stop, pushed him backwards and he fell, fell down into the gaping emptiness..._

Snape gasped and found himself lying on the floor next to his bed, the blanket wrapped around him. He felt for the bruise under his hair, then struggled akwardly out of the blanket, crawled up, shuffled into the bathroom, and fumbled in drawers for fresh clothes. When he was back in bed again he knew he should go to Hogwarts.

* * *

McGonagall was rather surprised. "The Pensieve? Yes of course you can use it, Severus. But I am curious. I do not believe you are going to give Occlumency classes again." 

"No. But some experiences have been bothering me too long already."

"As you wish. I will put it over there for you. So that you will be on your own." She took the Pensieve from the shelf and carried it carefully to a table at the far end of the room. Turning back to him, she said "And what is this calling me Headmistress? Didn't we have an agreement on that already?"

She passed by to get back to her desk. Snape was looking at the Pensieve. "I forgot."

Sheets of parchment rustled while he was extracting memories into vials.

"My Charms Teacher must have a bad influence on you. The _Fräulein_ is too young, my dear."

"I appreciate that you didn't put it the other way round,..."

Snape left shortly after, bewildered at the fact that he was forgetting more names, and dissatisfied that visiting to get them back had been of no avail.

* * *

Ted sat in the Great Hall, waiting for Alrun to come for breakfast. He assumed her night had been a short one, and she looked like it when she entered. "How was the film?" 

Alrun yawned with passion, thought of James in the light of dawn, mouth a little open and like a child in his sleep. "Delightful, funny! You should see it, too."

He watched her eating, and itched to tease her with inquiries as to whether the precious Head of Slytherin indeed sleeps in green and silver blanket covers, but instead he asked "Have you seen the old man lately?"

"No, not for a couple of weeks, if not months. Why?"

"Last night they found him on the grounds, near the tomb. He was lucky that the gamekeeper's dog apparently went ballistic about him, or else he might have frozen to death. Under the cloak he had only his nightshirt, and he was barefooted, imagine that..."

Alrun's stomach cramped around the swallowed kippers, which came to life again and desired to swim out. She stumbled out of the Hall and up the stairs, not knowing why she had to run. But she ran none the less, pushed the doors of the infirmary open and encountered an unexpected face. "Uncle Harry!"

Behind him stood McGonagall, talking quietly to an apocalyptically disfigured bulk, who hosted an independent, blazing blue existence in one of his eye sockets. That was, as her surrogate uncle introduced, Alastor Moody. Snape crouched in a bed, thin and grey, eyes restlessly darting across the room, not paying attention to the visitors. The nurse came in, with the apprentics in her wake, a crisp Irish girl whose flaming torrent of hair constantly befuddled the male students.

"At first I thought he's had a stroke, but that is not it," said the nurse. And as though to demonstrate, the old man suddenly sat upright in his bed, pointed a quivering hand at the apprentice, and jittered with a happy disbelief, "L...Lily!?"

Alrun, herself surprised, noted peculiar expressions on the others, from the apprentice who barely realised that she had been addressed, to Harry who blushed crimson with inexplicable rage and then paled, to the Headmistress, suddenly grey, who said "I never wished to see this," while Moody wheezed as he pulled the wand out of Snape's cloak and pocketed it, all of it done with the same unsuspected lissomness that Alrun had seen on Snape. Alrun thought that perhaps only the people with extraordinary reflexes had survived that strange war which had ended before she was born. That war in false colours behind dusty glass that no one had ever bothered to explain to her in detail, maybe because she had never cared to know.

When she asked Moody what he thought he was doing, he replied that Snape's current state of mind indicated that the man posed a threat to himself and everyone around if he stayed in possession of his wand, and that he, Moody, had known something was fishy ever since George Weasley had remarked on orderings to Snape, which had apparantly gone astray somewhere on their way to the islands, although the current situation had not been expected.

It hit her that her own father was perhaps only fifteen years younger than Snape. Could he as well end up like this?

"I sent someone to check his place. Apparently there's been an explosion," said Moody.

Alrun nodded. Suddenly, she felt exhausted. "And who is this Lily?"

"Mum," croaked Uncle Harry. "He thinks she's my Mum."

* * *

Alrun had seen Harry off. He had been shortcut and she hadn't felt invited to further inquiry, so it had been a quiescent but tense walk to the gates. She looked up at the castle on the hill. There it towered, sucking in and devouring people's entire life spans, while no one around really cared. For the first time, she hated it. Detached from her surroundings by the sudden empty lonesomeness she felt, she became restless and hastened across the grounds, by the Whomping Willow, down the path that led to the old derelict gamekeeper's hut, and further down to the overgrown tomb, until the lake stopped her. She stood, glared at its hard glistening, finally realised that you cannot escape an eclipse that lingers in your mind, and then sat down.

* * *

Alrun watched as St. Mungo's Healers saw the old man along Shadow Alley, downhill to where the thick white fog was waiting. She visited, learned about recovery from periodic attacks and that he liked _Zabini's Cheese Crackers,_ and brought newspapers until they told her that the news were upsetting him. She met Neville Longbottom, who was concerned about his parents while he was telling her that he would be going abroad for some time. 

Politely, she accepted yet another of Mister Lockhart's signed photographs, which would perpetually circle back to him via the nurse, who said "The Professor will be pleased to meet you! It's not a Lily day today. He didn't mention her at all." Alrun held a bunch of yellow and orange ranuncules to cheer up the Longbottoms' area, thought that soon there would be diapers, looked at Snape sitting by the window, stiff and upright like a statue carved from wood, and was certain that today he knew that, too. She walked across the room and sat down next to him.

On clear days, he was always wearing his cloak over the hospital clothes. He had been preoccupied with watching a fly as it crawled along the window sill, but now he gazed up. "Ah, the _Charming Fräulein_!"

For a while, they entertained some harmless smalltalk. The nurse carried the bright spot of flowers down the corridor when he suddenly said, "You grew up in Germany, so you will perhaps know a Muggle composer named Bach." Alrun confirmed, and he went on "One of those fugues he composed was left unfinished. Their composition has a lot to do with logic, and this one apparently did not resolve as he intended it. However, with patience and knowledge and a bit of luck-" his arm shot up and he caught the fly in his fist as it soared away from the sill, "I believe one could still finish it!" As they listened to the fly in his fist, they looked at each other and smirked. "Open the window, please."

He bent forward in his chair, and Alrun watched the fly escape from his fist and buzz away into the sky. When she was seated again, he took her right hand into both of his. "A fine lass we've got here," he said, quietly. "You may tell this to your mother."

* * *

Hermione was amused when Alrun mentioned it. "The last time I visited him he asked me whether _The Fräulein_ had any siblings, and I said she does as much have siblings as he has a son." 

"What does that mean?"

Hermione's lips twitched into a melancholic smile. "He seemed to think that you were his daughter."

"I...his daughter?" Alrun laughed, indecisive between embarrassment and shock. It was never pleasant to be confronted with parental sex life. If she found it hard to imagine mother and father doing the deed, it was impossible to see her with the old man. Well, both of them had been younger then, but still...she didn't know whether it would help if she knew what Snape had looked like decades back. "The two of you had something going on?"

"It's a long time ago, Alrun. It was during the war."

"But...why did he never check my birth date? That would have told him-"

"There are people who have such strong beliefs, one day they begin to think of their beliefs as truths. It comes with a lack of honest discourse and this again comes with an excess of solitude."

"And you let him believe it?"

"Did it hurt anyone that I did? He was happy with it, and now there are only the two of us left to know that it could have been possible at all." Hermione leant back in her chair, looked out of the window, into the past. "The bad thing about it all was not the fighting. What's bad are the breaks in between, when you come home and they are already there - Grief, Argument, Accusation, Guilt - waiting for you with a serving of stinging uncertainty that always leaves you antsy and hungry. Sometimes, stalemate makes you do things just to escape or because you need someone who knows but doesn't speak, weird things that you might regret later, unless...unless you close the book and forget them.

'We didn't know when and how it would end, Alrun. And then the end came so suddenly, and I felt the vacuum of gone friends and I just wanted to get away from it all. Maybe there was a spell too many in the last battle, I don't know – I was already in Germany and had barely realised the pregnancy when it failed."

The Moment of Translucency. It might never come again. Don't let it pass. "Mum. Did you ever kill anyone?"

"No," said Hermione and stirred her tea. "But Snape, he did."

"And was he sentenced?"

"Of course he was, but there was an extenuating cause. He was lucky, seeing that it had been Dumbledore whom he killed-" Hermione paused, then uttered a short laugh. "In fact, this was what he was holding against everyone. That we would have cared less if he had killed Crouch junior or Umbridge or Voldemort under the same circumstances. Or Fudge.

'It wasn't easy with him, even if you were defending him. He told me I was living in a cliché world, that I wasted my time with building artificial constructs about faked or inefficient killing curses. He said that it was absurdly easy to kill a person, that it only needed the willingness to push a button or a trigger or, if you were a fully fledged witch or wizard, to say two words. That it was much harder to torture someone because you actually had to adjust a Crucio, for what would be the point if it killed? But that the Avada Kedavra always was full scale because it was designed to kill, and the wand cared as much about it all as a gun that one Muggle boy would aim against another one, while claiming that the shot would only cause damage if you really wanted it.

'He said that he had, plain as it was, simply killed Dumbledore because of inevitable necessity, and that this was all to say about the deed itself. He was very angry with me..." She swallowed all the other reminiscences which made her throat sore, and decided that it was best to move on to the task ahead of them. "Now, Alrun. What shall we do with his ashes?"

Alrun recalled Snape's place in St. Mungo's, all tidied up. The nurse in the background, telling about his secret journal in the drawer, marvelling about how he had managed to gather all the necessary ingredients unnoticed, that Alrun must not feel guilty that it had been her ranuncules which he had used to complete the poison.

No trace of him had been left there except for his cloak on the freshly made bed, the round black buttons shining in a beam of light. "I know a place," she said.

* * *

Not much wind, but a dead sky and the breakers thundering as they were dumping the memory of a gale onto the shore. James waded into the surf, held up the bundle comprising cloak, wooden urn and the dahlia that had been donated by Ted, then threw it out into the waves. Alrun stretched out her arm, keeping a constant watch on its position as though it were a man gone over board. James stumbled back. He was still shaking with cold when he put his arm around her shoulders, although Ted had dried his clothes already. 

She huddled to him. On his cloak she recognised the peculiar smell of people who work with potions, the scent that she had smelled on Snape's cloak in the Library, when they had been bending over atlases to find remote destinations for apparition.

The bundle was only a small black spot now. It was dancing up and down in the boiling froth as it was pulled by the ebbing tide, away towards the yellow horizon.

**ooo Ende ooo**


End file.
